Highlights

Co La“Vanity Plate”

BBC did the best job of reporting Co La’s listening experience. That is, except for Mr. Papich himself (à la Shea Stadium). But couldn’t you imagine his set live? As soon as “Vanity Plate” hits: errybody gets down. You sweatin’ and that sound-suspense is just teasing ya. Checking that honey next to you; questioning if you should smile/nod or get your grind on. Maybe buy her a bottle of water first. Only you’re acting coy, cause this the first time IRL role-playing with your girlfriend. And she nervous cause you can smell her farts.

Role-play make me question where all this pseudo-screw/sampling spawned. Seems like it’s battle royal between Replica (TMT Review), I’m Fuckin You Tonight (TMT Review), and Daydream Repeater right meow. Who can sound the most postmodern? While you decide, don’t let this video persuade your opinion or nothing. Holla at NNA Tapes immediately for your copy of Daydream Repeater, and check out they’s revamped website!

“Komodo”

In the “Reptilians and Amphibians” installment of Life, the sequel to BBC’s magnificent Planet Earth, heroic naturalist David Attenborough narrates the hunt of the menacing Komodo dragon. In the clip, the dragons siege a water buffalo. At first they cause only minor damage to its hooves, but secrete deadly venom with every cursory bite. Despite its massive size advantage, the buffalo has no defense against the poison soon coursing through its limbs. But the venom takes weeks to kill, during which the dragons stalk with hungry patience. Weeks. The upshot? The prey spends the last sickly, lethargic days of its life face to face with the creatures that have sentenced its death and who will eventually eat its corpse. Nature at its most sinister.

Salva’s track isn’t macabre (though, curiously, the name resonates with the reptiles’ lethal “saliva”) or particularly patient, but it is a touch sinister, dark, and exotic, crawling down a sizzling beat. Could that vocalist, the seductive moaner, be fork-tongued? Is she saying, as if engaged in slow pursuit, “I’m gonna make my move”? But, then again, I bet it wouldn’t be so bad to spend a couple weeks face to face with her. Eaten alive, etc.

“Bass In Your Face”

Winning Sperm Party is a Glaswegian collective with a music label, a generator, and a penchant for bat-shit mental punk. Have a listen to Ultimate Thrush and Divorce for shining examples. The collective’s latest release, as video evidence will testify, is from a duo of equal insanity. Phat Trophies have an organ, a drum kit, and a cornucopia of woolly masks, and their first release on Winning Sperm is immediately enticing, most notably due to the fact that the tape features a dinosaur eating a four-poster bed on the cover. Whether it’s (the completely devoid of bass) “Bass In Your Face” or any of the other wonderfully named tracks on the tape, Phat Trophies are relentless in their attack, and thank goodness for it. It’s been a while since I’ve heard an organ used and abused like this.

The tape is available to purchase or to download (for free) at the Winning Sperm Party website.

“Something About Us” (Cherokee Remix)

Oh! Fellow grinders of chocolate, creamy milk mashers, my cocoa crumbling cohorts, I have a confession! Prepare yourselves: my favorite track from Discovery, that sweetest of bounties, is blasphemous: the slow track! Spare me! I admit; it may have something to do with that tragically maudlin segment in Interstella 5555, the rainbow pond and pink cotton puffs, which rents my heart in two each and every time. Or maybe it’s the bass line. Yeah. It’s that.

So, readers, I shamelessly present, via Earmilk, a very fine remix of that very fine track by French House entity Cherokee. This new “Something About Us” is an exercise in subdivision and acceleration. It is still smooth. There are bookend sounds of waves on a beach, which brings to mind a new landing on the island of Discovery, to see how its creatures have grown. They’ve grown good.

“Fok Julle Naaiers”

While I read about internet as a human right, my girlfriend is watching the newest Pirates of the Caribbean movie #eeek. So, if the internet were collectively passed in society as a human right, 30 years from now pirates will be the new hackers. Err, hackers the new pirate; the new deep black. Whichever, there would constantly be tons of new people arriving “late” to the internet for these hackates to digi-pillage. New people who consider nothing to be classist because they have no basis of classism. Eventually, errbody will have readily accessible internet — oh, and a computer and electricity, right? And those “late” arrivals will present the future of art and progression and culture and the extinction of humans void of internet communication. Because isn’t creativity and fresh viewpoints based on articulating misunderstanding? Maybe Die Antwoord is a part of this late-to-the-internet culture. Maybe “Fok Julle Naaiers” will become the new “cray.” Guess who’s back in their deus ex machina zone: DJ High-Tek.

Dejected Soul [exclusive mix]

I love hearing pitch-shifted vocals. Get the voice low or high enough and unique inflections are leveled — identity becomes ambiguous, accents become relatively indiscernible — and everyone kinda starts sounding the same. While it’s a way of deterritorializing and distancing, it also provides aesthetic continuity: listening to the very beginning of Heat Wave’s Dejected Soul — a new and exclusive mix for Tiny Mix Tapes — I’m immediately transported back to, well… yesterday, when I listened to the Eureka’d I’m Fuckin You Tonight, which features similar pitch-shifted sounds of artists past wrapped in sublime frequencies and sheer hellish miasma.

But don’t get me wrong: the sounds on Dejected Soul, Heat Wave’s fifth mix of the year, ain’t really half-remembered. It’s not like we’ve forgotten about The Zombies’ “Leave Me Be,” which here travels through quite the dimensional muck to get to the plane on which Heat Wave exists. It’s more, uh, half-dismembered? In any case, the continuity between the mixes is exciting, given that his source material on this mix is rock rather than R&B. Zoom out billions of miles away and time-warp 150 years into the future, and it’d probably all sound the same anyway, right? Pitch-shifting leads to distancing leads to continuity leads to time leads to space leads to relativism. You know what I’m saying.

Dejected Soul, mixed by TMT favorite Sean McCann, will have a limited tape run, but it’s also available for streaming below via SoundCloud (embed today!) and through Heat Rave, a new label that will take over Heat Wave releases from Deep Tapes. Check out the mix here: